Following the murder of at least 14 people in California, American liberals have questioned calls for prayer.
Updated December 3 at 9:11 a.m. ET

Directly after a mass shooting, in the minutes or hours or days between the first trickle of news and when police find a suspect or make arrests, it is very difficult to know what to do. Some people demand political action, like greater gun control; others call for prayer.

Vox Wrote:And others call for prayer and for major changes in divorce, abortion, drug, and immigration laws so that we can restore the family and our culture.

In the aftermath of a violent shooting spree in San Bernardino, California, on Wednesday, in which at least 14 victims are reported to have died, people with those differing reactions quickly turned against one another.

For example, here’s the Washington editor at the liberal publication The Nation, George Zornick, on reactions from the 2016 presidential candidates:

There’s a clear claim being made here, and one with an edge: Democrats care about doing something and taking action while Republicans waste time offering meaningless prayers. These two reactions, policy-making and praying, are portrayed as mutually exclusive, coming from totally contrasting worldviews. Elsewhere on Twitter, full-on prayer shaming set in: Many turned their anger about the shooting not at the perpetrator or perpetrators, whose identities are still unknown, but at those who offered their prayers.

This is not the first time this idea—that prayer is not enough—has come up in the Twittersphere, or in politics. “As I said just a few months ago, and I said a few months before that, and I said each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough,” said President Obama following the October shootings at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. He was not denigrating prayer—in the same speech, he went on to ask God for strength and courage for the victims.

Vox Wrote:
Prayer isn't enough. But that doesn't mean that gun control and messing with the Second Amendment are the answers. We need prayer and to restore the family, which requires a hundred changes in law and attitudes.

Others have been less nuanced. After Wednesday’s shootings, The Huffington Post quickly rounded up a list of tweets from politicians offering their prayers. “In short, basically anyone with a Twitter account shared thoughts and prayers in the immediate aftermath of the latest shooting,” the reporters wrote. “Which is kind of them to do, of course, but probably not enough to stop the next one.”

This cynicism offers a view into just how much religion and politics have changed in the United States. Prayer and political action have a deeply entwined history in America. From civil rights to women’s suffrage, nearly every social-justice movement has had strong supporters from religious communities—U.S. history is littered with images like the one of pastors and rabbis marching on Selma, side by side with political activists.

But now, even in the absence of information about the shooter’s identity and motivations, people have jumped to conclusions like this, from Democratic Senator Chris Murphy:

(On Wednesday evening, Murphy’s communications director wrote in, twice, asking me to note that his “boss’s tweet in particular was not in any way about the normal and thoughtful reaction of people to pray in times of tragedy in grief. It was directed at lawmakers whose only response to preventable attacks is to tweet without following up with action to stop it. He’s made that point many times.” The tweet itself has not been deleted or clarified.)

There are many assumptions packed into these attacks on prayer: that all religious people, and specifically Christians, are gun supporters, and vice versa. That people who care about gun control can’t be religious, and if they are, they should keep quiet in the aftermath of yet another heart-wrenching act of violence. At one time in American history, liberals and conservatives shared a language of God, but that’s clearly no longer the case; any invocation of faith is taken as implicit advocacy of right-wing political beliefs.

Vox Wrote:

I'm trying to figure out if this writer has an angle. He seems to be pushing for prayer and gun control, doesn't he? The way he worded a bit from the above -- "that people who care about gun control can't be religious" rather than "people who support gun control can't be religious." It makes it seem as if the only way to "care," period, is to be for gun control.

But what he says is so: that any invocation of faith is automatically assumed to be an invocation made by a conservative of some sort or a Republican. Interesting, non?

The most powerful evidence against this backlash toward prayer comes not from the Twitterverse, but from San Bernardino. “Pray for us,” a woman texted her father from inside the Inland Regional Center, while she and her colleagues hid from the gunfire. Outside the building, evacuated workers bowed their heads and held hands. They prayed.

I'll admit I too get angry when I see people offering up cheap platitudes about " prayer" and forgiveness without action, as if the mere act of prayer and fuzzy feelings alone is going to save the West from an islamic takeover. Certainly pray for the victims and pray to be spared the horror of finding yourself or your loved ones in some muslims bomb radius or crosshairs but pray also for the grace and the strength to fight back as individuals and as a society.

Pray like the soldiers at Lepanto who took both rosaries and bullets into the fray. Like that old saying goes, pray as if everything depended on God, act as if everything depended on you. Prayer without action is escapist fantasy.

And this is NOT about " gun control", it's once again about islam--- not " Islamism" but good old dyed in the wool normative islam.

These politicians are sickening as usual, trying to evade the islamic elephant in the living room and spin this into a gun control issue.

(12-06-2015, 10:29 AM)majellan Wrote: Has anyone thought about questioning the Islamic call to prayer, or is it just Christian prayers that are considered a waste of space?

Questioning the Islamic call to prayer would be "Islamophobic". Christian discrimination is basically the last accepted form of discrimination.

If any reporter, journalist or politician even so much as hinted at anything that could even be misconstrued as anti Islamic there'd be another mass shooting,stabbing, bombing or beheading somewhere as a result of it. The thing is, discriminating against Christians gets nothing but more prayers and non action, muslims chop off heads, shoot or blow people up when they are offended.

Christians have no scriptural justification for mass murder, muslims have the verses within the koran that allow for killing and the example of the mass murderer Mohammed, a guy who is supposed to be an exemplar worthy of emulation.

I'm really growing sick of the liberal ego. I mean really sick. With 3D printers these days, a person determined enough could make their own gun and even the ammunition. Actually a determined enough person could do quite a bit of damage without a gun. The irony here is liberals don't like to face the facts when their own extremists pull this nonsense.

"All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions," the list of demands read.

"In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it."

Straight from the liberal manifesto, but nothing in the media! Why? Well, that's negative publicity for liberal platform yet they expect every conservative to to stand up and dismiss the guy that shot up Planned Parenthood? I think its time to realize and be honest that its holding the "other guy" to different standard that is shafting this country. Politics isn't about the issues anymore. It's become an all out civil war fought with propaganda machines to see who can incite more rage in the "other side" to get them to look bad so the opposition can claim the high ground without firing a shot. It's weak, pathetic, and lazy. Such miscreants are unworthy to be leaders of any sort.

It's not an "obsession"; it's about the ability to defend oneself and one's family, and, for some, the ability to hunt. And behind all that, it's about the original intent of the Second Amendment, which is to keep the government afraid. A disarmed populace is a sitting duck, which is why politicians are often really keen on taking our weapons.

People get heated about this issue because, on the one side, you have Leftists who think the answer to everything is more government control, more erosion of civil liberties, etc. -- in this instance, banning firearms. Leftists see the problem of gun violence as a matter of access to firearms, instead of what it really is: the result of immoral, angry, disconnected people (with a few Muslim fanatics thrown in) taking their rage out on others.

The Leftist solution is to take away our firearms, which 1) wouldn't work, 2) would just change the form of violence the crazy people engage in, 3) is impossible, especially now that you can use 3D printing to print guns, 4) is against our Constitution, 5) would leave the innocent disarmed while the criminals ignore the law -- which criminals are wont to do -- and more able to prey easily on the now-disarmed innocent, etc.

The Rightist solution is to fix the family, restore decency, end race-baiting identity politicking, stop with the "soft bigotry of low expectations" by ending racist laws such as affirmative action, quotas, etc., to stop pathologizing masculinity, etc.

The Left thinks the Right "does nothing" and just "offers prayer" as a solution because the solutions (plural) the Right has doesn't entail banning guns. Plain and simple. To them, you're not "doing anything" about gun violence unless you disarm the people. So they get hysterical and accuse conservatives of being evil, not caring, blah blah. And conservatives are sick and tired of being name-called, of having the real problems with gun violence ignored, of having their positions misstated, etc.